Two top figures in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for president criticized President Donald Trump’s decision on Tuesday to fire FBI Director James Comey.
In an abrupt announcement of Comey’s termination Tuesday, the White House said Trump was acting on the advice of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. In a memo Tuesday, Rosenstein accused Comey of bungling the investigation of Clinton’s private email server.
Brian Fallon, the press secretary for Clinton’s campaign, told CNN after news of Comey’s firing broke that “all these months later, it still stands out that Director Comey’s handling of the Clinton e-mail investigation was a travesty.”
However, Fallon said, “the timing and nature of this firing that the Trump administration is announcing now belies any possible explanation that this has anything to do with the Clinton investigation.”
“It is clearly an act by a president who is feeling the heat from the FBI’s ongoing Russia investigation,” he said.
Fallon called for a special counsel to be appointed inside the Justice Department to investigate Trump, and for Congress to establish an independent select commission with subpoena power “to get to the bottom of this.”
Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, wrote on Twitter that the firing terrified him:
Twilight zone. I was as disappointed and frustrated as anyone at how the email investigation was handled. But this terrifies me.
— Robby Mook (@RobbyMook) May 9, 2017
Comey was about to lay the boom on Trump, I bet.
Yeah, I think the dead giveaway was Trump’s line in his letter about how he appreciated that Comey told him “on three separate occasions” that he, Trump, was not personally under investigation.
I suspect what happened was that as the Russia investigation has proceeded, and evidence of wrongdoing within Trump’s inner circle has mounted, Trump realized that either he now WAS a direct target of the investigation, or at least that the investigators were closing in and that he soon would be a target.
If so, then I would interpret that line as a not-so-veiled warning to others in the FBI that if they’d like to keep their jobs, they’d better turn their attention elsewhere.